A collaboration between citizens and government to monitor corruption around rice subsidies and rice production programmes in San Miguel in the Bohol province of the Philippines. 

The Bayaniham Undertaking Living in a Healthy and Organised Neighborhood (BULHON) or BULHON sa Panguma was developed and implemented by the Government Watch (G-Watch) programme of the Ateneo School of Government in Manila. 

The project involved citizens including farmers, agricultural technicians and local government officials in corruption and production monitoring efforts.

The Basel Institute on Governance worked with the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Global Anti-Corruption Initiative (GAIN) to assess the BULHON project. They wanted to understand the factors that contribute to the success of ‘social accountability’ projects like BULHON.

Factors for success

The assessment identified 2 main local factors that helped the BULHON project succeed:

• High levels of participation in community activities like village assemblies, and dense social networks between people. These mean that information spreads effectively through communities, and problems can be shared and solved together
• Local government officials being well embedded in their communities, with the boundaries between government and community being helpfully blurred and government officials readily available to everyone

Results

The research also identified positive impacts the project had for the local community, as well as achieving its main goal on corruption:

• Citizens who took part in the monitoring felt motivated and empowered, gained respect in their communities, improved their self-esteem and even made new friends
• Even people who did not take part in the monitoring themselves felt that the local government was ‘looking out for them’ and felt more able to come forward with issues
• Both farmers and local government officials felt that local government services improved, and farmers better understood the services on offer
• Because of improved techniques and use of resources, rice production actually increased in San Miguel
• Citizens, farmers and local government said that their attitudes to each other had improved

Source

Participatory monitoring, Philippines – participatory monitoring to improve performance of government services and promote citizen empowerment: a success story from the Philippines (PDF, XXXkb)